Complete Project Gutenberg John Galsworthy Works eBook

“I’m a selfish beast!” moaned the
smothered voice. “I don’t really
care for all these people—­I only care because
they’re ugly for me to see!”

Martin reached his hand out to her hair. If
she had shrunk away he would have seized her, but
as though by instinct she let it rest there.
And at her sudden stillness, strange and touching,
Martin’s quick passion left him. He slipped
his arm round her and raised her up, as if she had
been a child, and for a long time sat listening with
a queer twisted smile to the moanings of her lost
illusions.

The dawn found them still sitting there against the
bole of the beech-tree. Her lips were parted;
the tears had dried on her sleeping face, pillowed
against his shoulder, while he still watched her sideways
with the ghost of that twisted smile.

And beyond the grey water, like some tired wanton,
the moon in an orange hood was stealing down to her
rest between the trees.

CHAPTER XXXVI

STEPHEN SIGNS CHEQUES

Cecilia received the mystic document containing these
words “Am quite all right. Address, 598,
Euston Road, three doors off Martin. Letter follows
explaining. Thyme,” she had not even realised
her little daughter’s departure. She went
up to Thyme’s room at once, and opening all the
drawers and cupboards, stared into them one by one.
The many things she saw there allayed the first pangs
of her disquiet.

‘She has only taken one little trunk,’
she thought, ’and left all her evening frocks.’

This act of independence alarmed rather than surprised
her, such had been her sense of the unrest in the
domestic atmosphere during the last month. Since
the evening when she had found Thyme in foods of tears
because of the Hughs’ baby, her maternal eyes
had not failed to notice something new in the child’s
demeanour—­a moodiness, an air almost of
conspiracy, together with an emphatic increase of
youthful sarcasm: Fearful of probing deep, she
had sought no confidence, nor had she divulged her
doubts to Stephen.

Amongst the blouses a sheet of blue ruled paper, which
had evidently escaped from a notebook, caught her
eye. Sentences were scrawled on it in pencil.
Cecilia read: “That poor little dead thing
was so grey and pinched, and I seemed to realise all
of a sudden how awful it is for them. I must—­I
must—­I will do something!”

Cecilia dropped the sheet of paper; her hand was trembling.
There was no mystery in that departure now, and Stephen’s
words came into her mind: “It’s all
very well up to a certain point, and nobody sympathises
with them more than I do; but after that it becomes
destructive of all comfort, and that does no good
to anyone.”